Review by New York Times Review
SOMETIME in the late 1990s, Anders Brekhus Nilsen started drawing little comic strips about birds: tiny doodled finches with dots for eyes, chatting about seeds and philosophical inquiries. In 1999 he put together a bunch of those strips as a photocopied comic book he called "Big Questions." A few more issues followed, in which he started imagining more about the birds' personalities and establishing who was responsible for the crumbs that fed them: an old, bent-over woman, living in a shack with her idiot grandson. Then the strips kept growing, and so did Nilsen's capacities as an artist. The doodles and jokes began to coalesce when Nilsen dropped a bomb into the plot: an unexploded-but-ticking shell that an evangelical bird is convinced is a sign of divine providence. New issues of "Big Questions" continued to appear on a roughly annual basis (the final one turned up late last year). And somehow, gradually, the amateur scribbles evolved into rapturous, meticulous pen-and-ink pointillism, and the throwaway gags about birds eating and trying to avoid being eaten turned out to be central to a sprawling, uncanny work about fate and death whose stakes spiral upward while its scope remains confined to a few small creatures' territory. Once the bomb inevitably goes off, the elements of the book are set in motion, and whenever they threaten to touch down, Nilsen nudges them back up with another gust of event. A military plane crashes into the old woman's shack, and the birds try to figure out what to make of its stranded, dream-haunted pilot. A snake preparing to die leads a bereaved bird named Algernon into the underworld for a sort of avian Orpheus and Eurydice scenario. There's an owl, a nasty gang of crows, some squabbles over food. Nobody understands anybody else's motivations or actions, and when they think they do, tragedy ensues. But even death doesn't always take Nilsen's characters out of the story: they hang around as talking skeletons, or slowly move out of this world and into the next. The striking part of "Big Questions" isn't its story, as such, but its bird's-eye-view sense of time and motion. Long stretches of the book are wordless, proceeding at a finch's flutter-and-stop pace: each panel marks an incremental change. The characters are constantly pausing, observing their environment, moving a step, pausing again. Nilsen often spends a few pages on a brief conversation or the details of a tiny physical interaction, then pulls back to show us an empty, stippled landscape or cuts to an abstract mandala as a caesura in the story. "Big Questions" doesn't even pretend to be stylistically consistent. It starts as agreeable juvenilia and ends as grand opera, with a protracted, hallucinatory vision of a journey to the afterlife. A lot of the pleasure of reading this story as a single, five-pound work is derived from watching it accrue and take shape, from seeing Nilsen come into his power as a storyteller and creator of images. (He has actually started, finished and published a handful of shorter books of comics since beginning "Big Questions.") Nilsen quickly figures out how to stage complicated, deadpan physical comedy; the pecked-out fields of speckles in the early pages turn tinier and subtler, building depth and texture. It's hard to imagine that someone setting out to draw a nearly 600-page story would make some of the decisions Nilsen stuck himself with early on - not least the task of working with a cast of characters who are mostly identical birds with little in the way of visible facial expressions or body language. Still, some of the startlingly resonant images Nilsen works up in the initial chapters take on additional meaning later. One of the first great panels is a close-up of the idiot holding a finch named Bayle in his closed hand. Nilsen returns to that composition repeatedly, as a vision of being wholly in the power of something greater than oneself, framing it as a form of grace or disaster or both. (Bayle spends most of the rest of the book watching out for the idiot, sometimes perching on his head in a perverse parody of St. Francis.) MUCH of the vigor in "Big Questions" comes from the tension between its seriousness and its mockseriousness. The cover of one of the original issues (reproduced in an appendix) bears the subtitle "Anoesia and the Matrideicidic Theophany." A cosmic swirl of matter ultimately resolves itself into a pair of pants. There's a delightful scene in which one of the finches, trying to make sense of the downed airplane - is it some kind of bird, or some kind of egg? - accidentally invents Plato's allegory of the cave: "Let's say you were hatched in the hollow of a giant tree, right? . . . And furthermore, you couldn't even turn around to look out at the rest of the world. . . . Like maybe you'd gotten stuck in some sap." But there's also a palpable darkness to Nilsen's anthropomorphic antics: birds and snakes have primally ingrained, symbolic values. Some of the tableaus he draws are impossible to shake, especially a dream-vision of a snake knotted around a swan, their tongues entwined. And the food chain is never far from the surface of the story, as when a crow informs a finch named Philo that the doughnut crumbs they've been eating have rendered bits of animals in them: "You are what you eat, little bird. You're not just seeds and mindless bugs anymore." They pause for a couple of panels, while that sinks in. "Now you're dead animal, like us: the walking, flying dead," the crow says. "It's a hard taste to forget. Once you've had it, you can't go back." Another pause, and then a punch line that applies just as well to the addictive excesses of the book itself: "Here. Have some more." Douglas Wolk is the author of "Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean." He writes frequently about comics for The Times.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 4, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Gray finches eat seeds on grassland sparsely punctuated by trees and a one-room house and cut through by a shallow river. Of two close together, one eats steadily, while the other raises existential questions. Later, a big bird swoops down and drops a huge egg. A charismatic finch develops a kind of cult around the egg, which eventually explodes, killing most of the cult, including its leader. Simultaneously, a military plane crash-lands, demolishing the house, killing an old woman, and leaving her grandson, a speechless simpleton, alone on the veld. Some remaining finches regard the plane as another big bird and its pilot as somehow its offspring after he clambers unscathed from its cockpit. Eventually, there's a deadly clash between pilot and finches when the former assaults the idiot grandson. All the birds have names and personalities and converse like humans in this enormous and elusive allegory, 15 years in the making, in which Nilsen employs the lightly magical realism of Dogs and Water (2004) rather than the absurdism of his two books of monologues. The artwork that fleshes out that realism is the most elaborate in all of Nilsen's work, with beautifully detailed landscapes set in large panels, a broad palette of grays, and a cinematographic quality that suggests constant movement. Utterly distinctive work.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Epic in its scale and circumscribed in focus, Nilsen's incisive Big Questions is a philosophical novel that uses the techniques of fable to investigate faith, society, disillusionment, and catastrophe. A dozen years in the making, Nilsen's 600+-page story depicts the lives, bonds, and quarrels of a group of quizzical birds whose ontology is challenged by the appearance of a bomb, a crashed airplane, and a narcoleptic human pilot. At first these talkative avians resemble Charles Schulz's Linus with their naive philosophizing. But as the situation escalates, the book demonstrates how, in the absence of knowledge, germinal philosophy and early religion can be much the same thing. Competing mythologies, ideologies, and messianic fervor cause rifts within a community that otherwise unites as part of nature's predatory food chain. Nilsen outlines his figures with a thin but commanding line, and builds texture and atmosphere with dense stippling and hatching, creating a lush, verdant landscape. His breathtaking vistas resonate with his characters' struggle to assemble meaning from incomprehensible events-and to rebuild their world from the pieces left over. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Coming in at more than 600 pages and about five pounds, this is big in size and even bigger in content, the type of comic book that will change your mind about what a comic book can do. Representing 15 years of work by two-time Ignatz winner Nilsen (Dogs and Water; Don't Go Where I Can't Follow), this work features a cast of birds who are perfectly happy pecking at crumbs until, one fateful day, two strange objects fall from the sky (think The Gods Must Be Crazy for the aviary set). How they react divides the flock into two camps. When tragedy strikes, some of the more philosophical birds start questioning destiny, free will, and the very meaning of life. The simple-minded birds never really figure out the answers, but in asking the big questions they encourage readers to come to their own conclusions. Verdict Nilsen's art is beautiful and sparse, but it can be difficult to tell the handful of identically drawn main characters apart, and at moments you wish the plot would move in double-time. Instant gratification it is not, but if you push through to the end, it is well worth it. A great selection for any adult collection.-Ingrid Bohnenkamp, The Library Ctr., Springfield, MO (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
